2. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of gateway interfaces and more particularly, the present invention relates to a technique for improving the throughput of a gateway interface.
2. Description of the Related Art
The Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) is an open global specification that allows mobile users with wireless devices to easily access information and interact with services without delay.
Stated differently, the Wireless Application Protocol is an application environment and set of communication protocols for wireless devices which have been designed to enable access to the internet and advance telephony services independently of the manufacturer of the wireless device used.
The WAP allows mobile devices to interface with the internet as well as interfacing with corporate intranets and allows the delivery of a wide range of value added services to the wireless subscribers or clients while being independent of the network and wireless terminal. This allows wireless subscribers to access the vast store of information available on the internet using a handheld wireless device in the same fashion as presently available utilizing a desktop computer connected by land-line to an internet provider.
A Wireless Application Protocol gateway is the interface between the wireless client and an internet or intranet web server.
Normally, upon a request from a client, a web server forwards content to the WAP gateway.
The WAP gateway, prior to encoding the content from one format into content in another format, validates the content. The validation of the content is a time consuming operation and is performed by the WAP gateway whether or not the web server had previously validated the content.
Thus, the content may be twice validated, needlessly consuming time and resources. This occurs because of the fact that the WAP gateway receives no information as to whether or not the content had been previously validated by the web server.
To overcome the above-noted problem, what is proposed is a technique for improving the throughput of a gateway interface by enabling the web server to inform the gateway as to whether or not the content has been previously validated by the web server utilizing, for example, HTTP headers.
The above-noted technique includes a client forwarding a request to the server for content via the gateway which is disposed between the client and the server. The server then determines if the requested content has been validated and if so, sets a predetermined header to xe2x80x9cvalidatedxe2x80x9d and forwards the requested content to the gateway and if not, either sets the predetermined header to xe2x80x9cnot validatedxe2x80x9d or does not set the predetermined header and forwards the requested content to the gateway. The gateway, upon receiving the forwarded requested content, determines if the predetermined header of the forwarded requested content has been set to xe2x80x9cvalidatedxe2x80x9d and if so, forwards the requested content to the client after encoding it and if not, validates the content and then encodes it and forwards the validated content to the client.